Blender Caliper

8 Ⅴ 2012

The Blender Caliper is a tool that helps you measure distances in Blender 3d in real world units. Not only that, but it does so using visible objects that you can render into your images. So you can for instance create an architectural visualisation with neat meaningful measurements in it for your client.

Right now the Caliper is not being maintained/updated.Perhaps in the future the funds can be found to update it.

The current version of the Caliper was crowdfunded by the Blender community in 2012. A total of €1185 was raised. This was enough to make the Caliper work, but not to maintain it for a long time into the future.

How to use the script!

This is a very brief description of how you can use the script, including a few tips.

Once you’ve added the Caliper script to your Blender addons folder and enabled it in your preferences, you can add a Caliper through the regular add menu in the 3D view.

BE SURE TO ENABLE AUTORUN PYTHON SCRIPTS IN YOUR PREFERENCES OR IT WON'T WORK

The initial Caliper consists of three visible objects. An Empty (this controls the entire caliper), and arrow mesh, and a text object.

If you remove any of these objects, the entire Caliper is automatically removed. Do not rename any of these objects!

Settings

You can find all the settings for the Caliper in the Empty’s object properties panel.

Do not confuse the Caliper settings with the “Custom Properties”.

You can set the base style of the arrow and how precise the measurement is in the top Box.

In the two boxes below you can set the start and end location of the measurement. You can either set them to a set x,y,z location or the location of another object.

Tip: Set the location of the start and end of the Caliper measurement to the location of a new Empty object so you can move them around more easily!

Measurement units

To change the unit of measurement from Blender units to something more “real world”, change the settings in your scene setup!These settings (combined with the precision setting in the caliper properties) let you control the entire measurement output.

Customising your Caliper

You can edit the settings of the text object just like any other, only the contents aredynamicallygenerated. To give it some colour, just select it and assign a material. The same goes for the arrow. You can select it and assign a colour, but currently the material link is lost as soon as you change the style in the Caliper properties.

If you want to edit the arrow yourself, feel free, just keep in mind to use the vertex groups so the Caliper will still work! If you change the style in the properties… your changes will be lost!

Feedback

Please let me know how the current version of the Caliper suits you!If you run into any bugs let me know through the Blenderartist.org forum!But be aware that there's only a small chance I can find the time to help.